FOSSE PARK

Still the same.
And yet different.
Better perhaps. Greener.
More trees than when I first played here
Half a century ago.

The children’s playground
More varied and safer
Than when Georgie Smith
Fell from the high swings.
His blood still there a week later.

Those swings long gone -
And the hut where Harold,
The straight-backed park-keeper,
Forbidding in his uniform,
Dubious with his glass eye
And the other on the little girls,
Drank tea with his epileptic gardener.

The toilets – ‘Gents’ at one end,
‘Ladies’ at the other - and the shelter
Half-way (romantically known
As ‘The Arbour’) - all gone too,
Due to graffiti, vandalism and various
Misbehaviour, I suppose, but look:

The brook and circle of elms in the middle
Are still there and the wrought iron railings
Where Paul Botterell impaled his leg:
They still fence the terraced perimeter,
And ring with the echoes of the stick
That I’d clatter along on my way home.

My childhood came alive here,
A stone’s throw away from the unhappy house;
It was my first route of escape
And for ten years this park was my second home.

How many balls did I chase towards the jacketed goal
And how many bat away from the bicycle wicket?
How much water did I drink from the tap
Behind one of the great oaks
With George and Chris and Geoff?

I can taste that water now,
Feel it cooling my hot boy’s face.
I can see the old men playing chess
Under the trees at the top of the hill,
(Like in that song about another park),
And the kids queuing at the tinkling ice-cream van.
I can smell the new-mown grass making me sneeze
Where we loll with our portable pirate radios
As the psychedelic pop songs of the mid-sixties
Stream like butterflies on the rippling evening breeze.

I used to lose track of time there -
Or maybe time lost track of me.
When I left home and school,
Time would quickly find me,
The park soon left behind me.
Since then, life has been
Both cruel and kind to me,
But the park remains to remind me
Of the roots here that will always bind me.


(2009)


Nostalgia set in very early for me and I tried to write this poem several times without success over the years, so I was pleased when it was finally finished. The song alluded to in the eighth stanza is Jimmy Webb’s ‘MacArthur Park’ (‘the old men playing checkers by the trees’). It was a worldwide hit for the Irish actor, Richard Harris during the Summer of 1968, by which time my tenure at the park was just about over.